


Idling

by mlyn



Series: Repair Work [5]
Category: Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-01-21
Updated: 2005-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:55:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mlyn/pseuds/mlyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Many thanks to the betas who helped me with this one: Gwyn, as usual, and Maygra and Blackmeow as well.</p></blockquote>





	Idling

Dom switched off the TV and listened. He thought he'd heard a car drive up in front of Luis's, but he couldn't be sure. Now with the house quiet he could hear voices and footsteps. "...think this is it."

He was on his feet by the time the knock came, nearly tearing off the screen door in his rush to get it open and Mia in his arms. She chuckled and patted his back, then pushed to get him to loosen his grip. "I'm okay."

"I was so damn worried." Dom just hugged her again, then looked over her head at Vince. _Thanks_ , he mouthed. Vince just shrugged and slipped past them into the house. Dom took his lead and nudged Mia over the threshold, closing the door behind them.

Vince came back down the short hallway from looking around. "Where is he?"

Dom rubbed a hand over his head. "Gone, back to LA."

Vince hissed in anger and thumped a fist against the wall. Mia looked quickly at Dom. "What? Why?"

"We had a disagreement. I'm sorry, Bella," he murmured to her. "I hate that you went through all this for nothing."

"This mean you're not a fag anymore?" Vince asked loudly. Mia groaned while Dom shrugged uncomfortably.

"Shut _up_ , V," Mia said. She turned back to Dom. "He hasn't quit that crap for the whole trip."

"Just want to know what's up with you, is all." Vince helped himself to a beer and sat on the couch.

Dom joined him on the couch. "Couldn't have offered me one?" he asked, nodding at the beer. Mia gave Vince a look and got drinks for her and her brother, then sat on the floor near Dom's feet. Dom got exactly two and a half swallows in before Vince started right up again.

"Too bad he's gone. I was sure itching to kick his ass."

Mia snorted derisively. Dom leaned back into the couch and rubbed his eyes hard, resting his beer between his legs. "I took care of it." He felt a touch on his knee and opened his eyes to see Mia watching him worriedly.

"What's going on with you and him, Dom?"

"Yeah, man, you promised explanations."

Dom looked over at Vince in confusion.

"Brian did," Mia corrected Vince. It occurred to Dom that her saying that was the first time Brian's name had been uttered since they'd arrived, even though they hadn't done anything _but_ talk about him. He felt uncomfortable hearing the name, like it just damned him all the more.

"All right, whatever. Let's have it." Vince gestured with his bottle before taking another gulp.

Dom took one of his own and nodded. "Don't really know how it started, back in LA. I just couldn't get him out of my head. I wanted to trust him."

"He's seductive," Mia murmured.

Vince snorted. "I _told_ you he was a cop. I told you all along," he started, voice rising. Mia gave him a dirty look and punched him in the thigh. "Ow! _Okay_."

Dom persevered. "He came down here and found me. We hung out for a while, talking about stuff. He'd been doing things for me, fixing up the Charger and seeing about _you_ getting some slack," he said to Vince. "I gave him a break, then..." He shrugged awkwardly. "Stuff happened."

Mia cleared her throat and tried to move them on. "When was that?"

"'Bout six months after everything went to hell and I came down here. He wanted me to come back to the States with him, but I couldn't. He left to try and make things right with his boss, but we kept in touch. Wrote letters and stuff. Friday he drove down here again."

"Spring Break," Vince muttered.

Dom nodded.

"He was just going to stay through Monday, but...stuff happened."

"So you said." Mia raised an eyebrow when Dom shot her a dark look.

"Yeah. That's all I'm going to say on it, too. Anyway, I wanted him to stay; he wanted to stay, but he started getting on my nerves with these ideas he had." He didn't even want to recount it; it sounded so trivial when he thought about saying it aloud. "And then Mia, you got arrested."

"Shit, Dom, you didn't take that out on him, did you?" Mia took the bottle out of her brother's hand and held it away from him, as if by taking his treat away he'd cooperate. "You did," she concluded from his expression. "You asshole."

Dom leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, rubbing his eyes again. "Mia—"

She cut him off, her famous temper rising quickly. "Dom, when are you going to learn the word _compromise_? It's always been your way or the highway, and everyone just has to put up with it. You're going to keep losing people if you keep doing this." Her piece said, she got up and snatched Vince's empty bottle, then took everything into the kitchen. She rattled around in there for a while as Vince shot Dom a sympathetic look. He rolled his eyes in return and went to Mia.

He found her at the sink, scratching the labels off the bottles with her nails. She always did pull a Martha Stewart when she was frustrated and needed something on which to take out her aggression. He put a hand on her shoulder and settled his hip against the counter. "Bella. How did I not compromise? You were in _jail_. He screwed up big time. I was sick of his bullshit, so I told him—"

"That's just it, Dom. Everything's got to be the way you want it, and to hell with everyone else. It's nobody's fault that his neighbors are nosy and paranoid, and I got hauled in. Quit using me as an excuse for you being an _asshole_." She pushed him away and started running water in the sink, digging sticky label paper out from under her nails.

That shocked him into silence. Without him to counter her, she continued ranting.

"'His bullshit,'" she mocked in a low, thuggish voice. "You think I can't see right through you, huh? I mean, you've been with him in one way or another for months. You said yourself that you wanted him to stay down here after 'stuff happened.'" She used the voice again. "But you get in one widdle fight and you can't cope with it—"

"It wasn't one fight, Mia. This whole weekend's been fucked up."

She shut off the water with a slap at the handle and turned to face him, her hands dripping unheeded onto the floor. "You _wanted_ him, Dom. Even before you knew it, you did. I've been thinking back, back before Race Wars, and it's so obvious now." She lowered her voice as her expression softened. "So why are you letting a couple of arguments get in the way? Are you really that afraid of being happy? Or is it just being happy with him?"

He didn't have an immediate answer for her, but she didn't want one anyway. When he just shook his head, she slipped her arms around him. "Just think about what I said, okay?"

Pressing his face into her hair, he nodded and hugged her tightly.

Mia left a short time later to arrange for motel rooms for her and Vince, taking her car and leaving the moving trailer filled with Brian's stuff. Dom wandered into the front room and stood at the door looking out, his eyes on the trailer. He knew what it held. He both wanted to look inside and dreaded doing it.

Vince came up and nudged him in the shoulder. "They have anything to drink in this town?"

Dom glanced back over his shoulder. "My beer not good enough?"

"Aw, y'know. I was thinking we could hang out somewhere with a few more live bodies, get some hard stuff."

It sounded like a decent suggestion to Dom.

After a couple shots of tequila, Dom straightened up on his stool and looked at his friend. "How's the law treatin' you?"

Vince shrugged, playing with a pretzel. "Pretty much done with that shit."

"Gotten any races in?"

"Just got the Maxima back from paint. This green turned out nice; real dark, but candied. Turned some heads the other night."

Dom nodded with approval. Vince went back to Dom's question. "I've been watchin' for a while. It's not the same without you."

It hurt to think of what he was missing, but Dom managed a smile. "Just giving other poor bastards a chance."

They shot the shit for a while longer, talking about old friends and new issues. As long as there wasn't trouble between them as there had been so much of the time Brian had been undercover, Dom found Vince a pleasure to talk to. They knew each other's history, shared mutual friends and inside jokes, had memories that no one else shared. Sitting down over a beer inevitably turned into lying around and killing a case. Vince had his faults, and he could drive Dom nuts, but they had a relationship of brothers.

Later, to break a lull in the conversation, Vince nodded toward a guy sitting at the other end of the bar. "What about him?"

Dom looked, sucking on a lime. "What _about_ him?"

"Would you fuck him?"

It took all his energy not to bounce his head off the bar, or Vince's. All of the peace he'd built up while talking over tequila was gone in a moment. "For chrissakes, I'm not cruising. You _know_ me, Vince. What's with the stupid questions?"

Vince poured another shot and swallowed it before answering. "I don't know if I do know you, man. You never dated men before."

Oddly, Vince announcing the dissonance between them was one of the most hurtful things Dom had experienced in the last twenty-four hours. He slid the bottle to himself and poured one shot, downing it without the ceremony of salt and limes, then another, before answering. He coughed once to clear his throat of the burn.

"You know how we've always been, you and me? How we'd give up our freedom for each other, closer than blood, be there for each other for our entire lives?"

Vince nodded.

Dom got up from the barstool. "I felt like that for him, only more." He walked away, heading for the bathroom, leaving Vince to digest that.

It wasn't entirely true. The friendship he had with Vince was definitely easier than the one he'd had with Brian...but whatever the hell he'd had with Brian couldn't compare to anything he'd ever had before. Not with Letty, not with any other girl, and not with Vince. And the realization scared the hell out of him. Exactly how much had he fucked up both his life and Brian's?

After he'd relieved his bladder and thrown some water on his face in an effort to clear his head, he went back out. His friend looked—understandably—like he was both weirded out and pissed off. Dom murmured, "Let's get out of here," and Vince nodded gratefully.

Dom drove Vince straight to the motel for him to get his room key from Mia. He parked in the lot, but Vince wouldn't get out. After a minute Dom said, "Vince," and then was promptly interrupted.

"So this thing you had with him, it was serious?"

Dom suppressed a sigh. At least Vince wasn't bitching or being smug. "Yeah. I think it is. Was."

"Do you regret it?"

Dom had done some heavy thinking during the drive. "I regret what I said to him. Mia's right, I was an asshole. But I don't know how to make it right. I don't know if I can, or should."

Vince leaned his back against the door, turning on the seat. "You'll figure something out. I don't know what to say, though."

Dom jerked a shoulder, playing with his keys. "It's okay. My problem."

Vince nodded, obviously feeling awkward, and plucked at the door handle. He held out his fist and Dom bumped it with his. "Later."

Back at his own place, Dom paused on the way to his door and looked back out at the street. Before he even realized what he was doing, his feet took him back across the scrubby grass and gravel.

He pulled open the doors to the trailer. Boxes were piled haphazardly inside, along with black garbage bags bulging in weird shapes. Clothes and essentials, it looked like. He grabbed a couple of bags and dragged them in. Before he knew it, he'd made a few trips and cleared everything out of the trailer.

Back in the house he sat down in the living room with another beer, surrounded by bags and boxes. Reaching for the nearest thing, he opened up a bag and started pulling out clothing. A lot of t-shirts, some jeans, sweatshirts and a couple of socks missing their mates. He pushed the bag and the clothes aside and opened a box. Pictures in frames, random medicine cabinet contents, books, a handful of CDs. He started pulling things out to look more closely at them. The pictures were actually paintings of cars. He wondered if Brian had done them. From the looks of things, one was a '64 Mustang and, oddly, a mid-'70s station wagon. He hadn't known Brian was such a classics man.

He kept digging until late into the night, finally going to bed around four a.m. His back was aching from sitting hunched over on the floor, and he was starting to feel a little hungover. But he'd discovered at some point that the front room smelled like Brian, and that the unique mix of sea salt and pheromones was coming from the bags of clothes. He flopped onto his bed and curled up with one of Brian's t-shirts under his cheek, a security blanket against his stupid choices.

Mia woke him up the next morning, or rather, the scent of her coffee did. He slouched into the kitchen and deposited himself at the small table, slurping gratefully at the cup she set in front of him.

"Are you going in to work?" She took her own cup, loaded with milk and sugar, and sat across from him. He nodded and rubbed at the itchy stubble covering his jaw. He hadn't shaved in a few days, he realized.

"Nothing else to do."

"How about calling Brian?" she asked gently. "He'd be back in LA by now." Dom didn't react to the proposition, and concentrated on playing with the handle of his mug. "I could take his stuff back, if you want."

He shook his head, though he couldn't have said why he didn't want Mia to do it. "Leave the stuff here. I'll take care of it."

"Will you, Dom?"

He knew what that meant. Back when he'd had the store and the garage, Mia had always been hassling him about business decisions he didn't want to make. He had more fun with the cars and the clients, not the vendors. But this wasn't about his tab at The Racer's Edge or getting fire insurance for the store. He looked up and met Mia's eyes.

"Yeah. I just need some time."

She sighed, the sound indicating that she wasn't sure he was right but she'd trust him anyway. "Okay. We'd better get out of here; Vince has work and I have to return the trailer."

"Bella." Dom got up and pulled out his wallet; it was in his jeans, which he'd slept in. "Take another day and go to the beach, okay? I got the extra charge for the trailer. Go get a tan or something, whitey."

Mia hemmed a little but took the bills Dom offered. He grabbed her fingers and pulled her into a hug with his arm around her neck, kissing her firmly on the forehead before she got herself free. "You stink," she said, nose wrinkled.

"Yeah, well, you're ugly." It was an old game between them, and managed to make her smile. She finished her coffee and called Vince back at the motel to get ready to leave.

He did need a shower, though, so he took one after she left. Moving around the small house, he had to determinedly ignore thoughts of Brian shaving in the bathroom, Brian walking around with just a towel on, Brian kissing him under the spray of water. He didn't once meet his own eyes in the mirror as he shaved and brushed his teeth.

Luis obviously had noticed the lack of Brian's presence and Dom's state of mind, but was astute enough to judge the situation. When Dom had told him that he wouldn't be moving after all, Luis only nodded knowingly and didn't ask any questions. The afternoon before, at the end of his first day at work without Brian, Dom had thanked him quietly before leaving. Nothing else needed to be said.

So he went to work, and came home, and looked at the jumbled mess in his front room. He went into the kitchen and forced himself to eat something, took another shower to wash off the grime of the job, and dressed in some old sweats before going out to the front room again. Almost as though Brian's things were drawing him out there to look at them.

He spent another evening looking through the boxes and bags, and found some things from Brian's childhood. Evidently his mother had kept mementos all the way through high school: yearbooks, projects, report cards. Brian was a decent student, not stupid but not fantastic, except for a couple of years. Rebellion, Dom guessed. There weren't any missing years, so the thing about boosting cars and doing time in juvie had been fake. Thinking about what Brian had told them that might have been truth and what had been fiction was intriguing. Dom started searching for details, building up pieces of Brian in his mind. There were grainy black and white photographs of sports teams, with a blond and smiling Brian somewhere in the mass of teens. The name "O'Connor, B." in small black print became tantalizing. But it wasn't enough.

This time he knew better than to stay up all hours only to drag himself around work the next day, exhausted. He forced himself to stop early and head to bed, falling quickly into a deep sleep. That it was dreamless was a small mercy.

So it continued, days of putting his hands to work until Luis sent him home, nights of obsessing over someone else's life spread over his floor. When the weekend came he went to the beach to get out of the house, but the ocean reminded him of Brian and didn't make him feel any better. Eventually, he ran out of boxes to go through, clothing to touch and smell. When that happened, he boxed everything up and put it all in the corner of his room. Then he called Mia.

"I need to do something, Mia."

She just waited, knowing better than to try to drag the topic out of him. He let the silence hang for a second before cutting through it.

"He hasn't called you, has he?"

Her voice was quiet. "You know he hasn't. I would have told you."

"Yeah." He rubbed his head and leaned against the kitchen wall. "You think I should call him?"

"You're usually not this slow," she said lightly, needling him. "And you wouldn't be asking me if you didn't want to do it."

So Dom called. He got Brian's voicemail and left a message, short and bittersweet, and vague in case someone had ears listening in: "This is D. Please call."

He left five more messages like it for the next five days, and still did not receive a response. Finally he composed a text message, taking his time spelling it out because he and Brian both hated that teenage abbreviation shit.

 _A quarter mile is too short. Now I'm looking to stay in for the long haul._

After sending it, Dom went to the kitchen, staring at the post-it note on the fridge with Brian's cell phone number and a post office box address. Then he called Mia to let her know that he'd be arranging for a moving service to take the boxes and bring them back up to Echo Park. He wondered if she could try to get them back to Brian. He would've sent them straight there, but he wanted a familiar face to accompany them. Brian might get the wrong impression with a bunch of unannounced boxes from his lover landing on his doorstep. Former lover.

"Sure," Mia said. "Dom...did you call him?"

"He didn't answer," was all he said.

He made more calls. He tried Brian's cell phone company, claiming to be his brother trying to settle Brian's accounts after an accident. But the minute he asked for a work number or other contact information for Brian, he got the message that the records were confidential before the operator hung up on him. It'd been a long shot; hardly anyone would believe a story like that.

He called the post office where Brian had rented a box, but they too hung up on him before he could get a spiel going. He called The Racer's Edge, but Harry hadn't seen him. Neither had Hector, and with the amount of people in Hector's circle, it would be hard for Brian to be back in the racing scene and _not_ get noticed. It was like he'd disappeared. It wasn't hard to imagine in a city with over nine million people, but Dom's world had always been pretty small. He had trouble forcing himself to realize that Brian wasn't in it any longer.

A few days after he got the boxes shipped out, Mia called him. Brian's house was empty, emptier than she and Vince had left it. He wasn't there; his neighbors didn't know where he'd gone.

With no way to contact Brian and no word from him, nothing else could be done. Mia put the boxes of stuff in the basement of the Echo Park house, and Dom struggled with the prospect of having to give up the hunt.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the betas who helped me with this one: Gwyn, as usual, and Maygra and Blackmeow as well.


End file.
